What you should do is use 16th triplets or 32nd notes (depending on tempo), and using 2 cymbals alternatively (first cymbal 1 hits, then cymbal 2, etc.). Then you copy/paste those hits for the swell length... select the swell, and edit the velocity so that it has exponentially rising curve... works for AD very well.

I'm thinking you mean building a swell, with multiple hits like a drummer would, rather than reversing the decay like Hendrix did, I dunno though.

If I'm think the missing ingredient to the natural sound here may be to soften the hit my using a slow attack. It will make the stick sound disappear.

It doesn't really matter what you use. If you don't have EZ or AD, you can do the same thing with shortcircuit. Come to think of it I don't know if you can do that in EZ, but you can in AD, and this is how

Look at the Volume attack slope - and combine this with EvilDragon's suggestion

nor the faked MIDI note seq, as EvilDragon suggested. all workarounds could work - but none is close to the real swell sample.

i dont dare to imagine how much polyphony these "MIDI" swells need.. and if you use EZ/AD.. multichannel/multisamples triggered @ every note, played out full lenght.. tooooooo much polyphony used for nothing.

i dont dare to imagine how much polyphony these "MIDI" swells need.. and if you use EZ/AD.. multichannel/multisamples triggered @ every note, played out full length.. tooooooo much polyphony used for nothing.

I don't have any issues with polyphony of those swells on my computer And it can sound fairly articulate.

I don't have any issues with polyphony of those swells on my computer And it can sound fairly articulate.

maybe the cymbals are chopped earlier then? i still think its a massive overkill for a simple swell that you can have from a single stereo (or even multichannel) sample. and its only fairly accurate - as you wrote

maybe the cymbals are chopped earlier then? i still think its a massive overkill for a simple swell that you can have from a single stereo (or even multichannel) sample. and its only fairly accurate - as you wrote

youre right tho, this is how a real drummer "triggers" the swell..

No, it doesn't happen BBB, I tried at 64T with AD and it's smooth as silk. AD is very well coded, I have an AMDx2 5600 and 2 Gig of ram, and I can't make AD glitch.

Having said that this was one track in isolation, if polyphony problems did arise these things could easily be rendered to audio to a single item - I think you would do that anyway surely?

In addition I would say the smooth build EvilDragon suggested may be too even, a real drummer would accent in places, this might be accomplished by having the same sample without the slow attack on every 3rd or 6th beat at a louder volume, that's just for starters, you have to think like a drummer - but it should be entirely possible to make a believable sample that fiots you music in less time than it takes you to find one that was custom made for the job

Yeah, I was doing a more generalized approach. I like this because you can do x bar long swells and you can articulate it dynamically just by drawing velocity (if only we could draw it as an automatable envelope in Reaper yet!) and accentuating when needed. It is MUCH more flexible than an actual swell recording, which is one off, basically.

Yeah, I was doing a more generalized approach. I like this because you can do x bar long swells and you can articulate it dynamically just by drawing velocity (if only we could draw it as an automatable envelope in Reaper yet!) and accentuating when needed. It is MUCH more flexible than an actual swell recording, which is one off, basically.

Holy crap, this works great (in AD)! With Tedwoods's volume suggestion it's almost perfect.

i have some of these samples saved as Track Templates /w (multitaked) media.
(snap offset set to the 'musical peak' of the sample)

1 sec. to load - and a few seconds to try a few takes (variations, new samples)

its fast enough for me.

Is that an audio sample then BBB?

Have you overlooked the meaning of my post then? That is if you customise your own piece to suit the piece you are writing you have total control and flexibility before you commit it to an audio sample.

Of course I recognize it only takes a second to load a template, but my point was about finding the sound you want for the track. How long does that take?

I always have an idea in my mind that no matter where I look I can't find that sound - unless i make it myself

as i wrote, it takes a few seconds to try the different samples in the multitaked Item, in the song context. (switch to prev/next take, or choose one in Lanes ON mode)

Yeah that's true BBB, but if they don't work it's a few seconds wasted. I can't actually try any of this stuff unless I download it first. Then I have to remember where I put it and whether it is remotely suited to the job I am doing. A few seconds you say, but I have thousands of samples - 99.99 of them never get used

Sounds good shemp, I thought you meant a slower build up with a few accents in it, but it proves the technique works.

usually they have too much dynamics in the mix context, but its easy to solve using 'Take Vol. Envelope', for eg.
i dont use a compressor for that. every take can have its own Vol Automation, and its even WYSIWYG. i love it.

it can be done w/the MIDI way too - but imo that takes a bit more time.

The other thing you can do, if you want the same cymbal, and your program allows you to do this is load the same sample to another pad. The problem you're having, I'm guessing, is with retriggering the same sound so that you don't have the overlap. The graph that Evil Dragon shows the swell in velocity. The only thing I'd add is don't make it an angle, some hits are going to be louder than others naturally. The general shape should be an angle, but some of the velocity hits should fall outside the ramp. If you have two pads with two different MIDI numbers hitting the same sample, you'll get the overlap you're looking for.